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Now that Tuesday’s elections are settled, Republicans can unify around their congressional candidate by sending him all their money.

Whether it’s Rick Allen or Lee Anderson left standing, he’ll have a lot less money and a lot more bruises after this nasty party scrimmage. John Barrow, meanwhile, will be fresh as a daisy and sitting on top of a pile of cash, ready to fight every step to November.

I’m writing before the votes are counted, and I expect that surviving candidate to be the always-misunderestimated Lee Anderson. Today’s results show if I called it right or not.

While it wasn’t exactly a case of the lion and the lamb canoodling, it was still a surprise Thursday when Wright McLeod threw his support to Lee Anderson in the 12th Congressional District.

It was just three weeks ago that the four-way Republican race seemed to be edging toward fisticuffs. Anderson’s campaign had sent out a mailer asserting that McLeod and Rick Allen, unlike him, had no public service experience, a claim Anderson’s camp based on several elected offices he’s held.

Back in January, the pending merger of Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State University was still a somewhat novel idea. Area residents discussing the topic mostly focused on possible names for the new institution, like an engaged couple discussing caterers and cakes.

At that time, I worried that we were talking too much about the names, and too little about what the marriage of the universities would become.

Even though they don’t count for anything, it’s easy to understand the write-in votes for candidates in uncontested races as a protest, or an unwillingness to endorse the presumed winner.

But why in the world would someone deprive him or herself of a vote in a contested race?

In the July 31 primary, voters could write in another candidate’s name in any of the non-partisan races. At the top of the ticket was a long list of races for state judgeships (state supreme court and court of appeals) with no opposition.

Among friends, prior to Tuesday’s election, I had been predicting Lee Anderson and Wright McLeod would be in a runoff for the 12th District congressional seat.

We still aren’t 100 percent sure, but it appears instead front-running Anderson will take on second-place Rick Allen in the Aug. 21 Republican runoff.

That’s barely two weeks away, which means we’ll be inundated with political messages crammed into a short time-span, with the intention of getting voters back to the polls and attracting some of the nearly 75 percent who stayed home.

We live in an unfortunate age of manufactured outrage and faux indignation.

Several recent episodes make that abundantly clear. And they also show why the American public, increasingly, is so disillusioned with their country’s politics that they’ve tuned out and turned over control to the fringes.

First, of course, was the folderol over Chick-Fil-A.

Did the restaurant chain’s chief operating officer say homosexuals are condemned to a fiery hell? Did he put on a hood, light a cross and hang someone?

Maria Sheffield is going to have to get herself a tractor if she’s to keep up with the boys.

Everyone who knows Lee Anderson – and I’ve known him my entire life – knows he’s a country boy. So when he launched his campaign for the 12th District seat in Congress, moving to a much higher-profile stage, there was considerable cringe-factor over him using a tractor in his logo.

After all, the punditry said, if your opponents are inclined to depict you as a hayseed, why emphasize it with pictures of farm equipment?

Today is the publication date for The News-Times’ annual Back to School edition, and that also means principals report back to Columbia County schools today.

I’d ask where the summer went, except that those of us with year-round work schedules don’t get the same summer break as school children and staffers. For them, however, that vacation quickly is drawing to a close.

One of the more frequently quoted, and entirely misunderstood, verses in the Bible is Matthew 7:1: “Do not judge, or you too will be judged.”

The passage is misinterpreted by taking it out of context. The second sentence is omitted, and without it the verse doesn’t have its full meaning: “For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.”